Bookends
by Never.A.Morning.Person
Summary: The dragon is not dormant. He's reciting Shakespeare and waiting for the sea nymphs. The Boy Who Lived is guarding the bathroom door.


**A/N: **Harry Potter lives in a house by the ocean, Draco Malfoy went to Oxford and talks to moving pictures. What are you talking about, this makes perfect sense.

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><p><strong>BOOKENDS<strong>

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><p>In the dream, the water is green. He dives and forgets, and the beating heart of Atlantis calls for him to strain a little further, go a little further down, sink, if you will. Sometimes, he does.<p>

Other times he keeps his eyes shut against the underwater light and fights for the surface.

Whenever he makes it, his fingers wrap around a pale, bony ankle and his heart stops. He rubs his cheek against the wet skin and _pleads_.

And then he pulls, as hard as he can.

* * *

><p>The mornings are quiet, so he despises them. The house is small, the silence doesn't threaten to soak through his skin and infect his bones, make them black and crumbly, but rationality holds nothing on fear.<p>

He makes sounds happen. The pitter-patter of water on the sink, his footsteps dragging on the dusty floor, rough with age. Knuckles on closed doors though there's no-one to answer, soft humming while the water boils. Cups smashed on the floor, three or four on a good day, then pieced back together so he won't know. The kitchen knives he makes duel each other in mid-air, dangerously close to his face. Low sobbing, sometimes, on the bathroom floor, screams muffled by pillows so old they crunch under his teeth.

When he plays the piano, it's scared and uncertain, but it's his favorite time of the month, when he forgets himself enough to be human again.

Harry doesn't recognize the music, but that's because he didn't grow up in a wizarding household. He mistakes survival instinct for love and buys him sheets upon sheets of piano music, pieces Draco isn't talented enough to play.

He keeps them all.

A lot of things have changed. Draco won't refuse the gift, but he won't say thank you either.

* * *

><p>Some nights, woken up panting and shivering from the dream –Draco refuses to call it a nightmare, nightmares was what a chubby little snot used to have in his oversized bed back in the Manor- he wishes for his mother. Her dry, thin hands on his forehead, her lips in his hair- and that's a fake memory, made up entirely by grief and a deep hunger for love that doesn't have to mean sacrifice. (Lowly, Muggle love, he would have called it once. He doesn't use that word anymore- but truth be told, he hardly ever speaks.) Narcissa loved her son with more than her soul, but that didn't mean she had to touch him when he was all sweaty and teary-eyed.<p>

Draco stays awake on the couch, eyes wide open until the smell of the sea fades away, until he's convinced that if he looks down he won't see black water covering the bitten floor. It takes hours, it takes til morning, there are so many nights that Draco doesn't sleep, just bites hard into his wrist and repeats lines from The Tempest like a prayer.

_Full fathom five thy father lies  
>Of his bones are coral made<em>  
><em>Those are pearls that were his eyes<br>Nothing of him that doth fade  
>But doth suffer a sea change<br>Into something rich and strange._

_(Do you want to know what I did these five years?)_

One night, horrible black night with the waves was so loud they were muting his thoughts, there was a hand on his chest. Draco thought of sea-nymphs and how they were finally here for him, _ding-dong, hark! now I hear them- _but the mouth on his didn't taste of seawater, there were no scales shining around those green eyes.

How did you get here, Draco wanted to ask the hand on his chest and the lips on his temple, did you swim or did we both drown in our sleep?

_Harry_, he said instead, and the kiss turned a little fiercer, but still, no razor-sharp teeth, no seaweed round his wrists, just breath pushed in his lungs like a phantom memory.

When he woke, the sun was there, and so was Potter, puttering around in the kitchen with his mess of black hair and his smudged glasses. When he said good morning, Draco's heart gave a hopeless jerk in his chest and his brain decided once and for all that last night had been a dream.

A nightmare.

* * *

><p><em>Do you want to know what I did these five years?<em>

No, Potter didn't want to know. Potter wanted to kick Draco's polished smile in, break all of his teeth and leave him bloody on the bar's filthy floor. Draco wanted to let him.

_I went to Oxford, Potter. Magicked my way in. I studied. English literature, four years. Terrible waste of time. Do you want to know if I was any good?_

Potter's hand on his wineglass was shaking, but he said yes.

_Horrible. I was horrible. But now I can recite all Shakespeare's sonnets by heart. Shall I compare you to a summer's day? Yes. And I particularly enjoyed Wilde. Have you read Oscar Wilde, Potter? His bitter humor reminds me of myself. I'm sure we would have been great friends. Too bad he was a Muggle. Did you know he was a sodomite? Asking to be executed, that man._

As Draco was, that day. He was begging. He talked so much, gesticulated wildly, put on his most charming grins and –he still thinks- a bloody good show.

Draco was going to kill himself that day, and he wanted Potter to beat him to it.

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><p>Draco speaks when Potter leaves the house. He needs the noise, you see. He talks to inanimate objects, he talks to the stove, to the noisebox, he talks to the other one with the moving images. He talks while he folds his clothes and stacks them neatly in his leather brown suitcase, he talks while he takes them out and puts them back in their drawer in Potter's bedroom.<p>

Mostly, he talks to the photographs.

Potter has a lot of photographs, stolen, Draco thinks, from his uncle's house. They are scattered around the house, inside books, under teacups, inside worn envelopes in his sock drawer. Draco has seen each and every one of them. They feature a strange-looking family, faces resembling intensely members of the animal kingdom. In most pictures though, it's just the family's son, a red-faced boy, blond and bloated. There are so many pictures of him that Draco feels that he knows the pig-boy personally. He was a pudgy, wailing baby much like Draco himself, his first bike had been red and seemed breakable under his enormous bottom, he had lost his two front teeth simultaneously, he had gone to some fancy college where he got to carry a walking stick. He looks a lot like his father, but he has his mother's ears. Harry seems scrawny and abused standing next to him, but back then he must have seemed scrawny and abused standing next to anyone.

Potter's not in most family pictures, and when he is, he's somehow cut out, an arm or half a smile left visible, a shock of unruly black hair or a quarter of his damaged spectacles along with half an eye. Draco finds himself dragging his fingers across each part of young Potter he can find in those photographs, index finger following the angle of a bony elbow, thumb smudging over a forehead and a scar, as if to wipe it away.

Draco wants to ask about the pictures. He wants to know why Harry keeps them, so many pointless moments in which he was ignored and unwanted. He wants to know if everyone in them is dead, if they're loved or forgiven now, if he's just waiting for a moment to burn them all in a fit of belated rage. He never asks.

And anyway, those aren't the pictures Draco talks to.

There are three framed photographs in the house, all of them the normal, magical kind. James and Lilly Potter, smiling and waving on their wedding day, Potter, Granger and Weasley, red noses and snow in their hair, sometime around their fourth year in Hogwarts, young James Potter, Remus Lupin, Sirius Black and some other fellow shoving each other around to fit in the picture frame, smiles wide and impossibly charming. Those are the pictures Draco speaks to.

It started one day, when he wiped the wedding picture on Potter's nightstand with his sleeve, and Lilly Potter grinned at him, chin resting on her husband's shoulder. "It's not attraction, you know," Draco had suddenly blurted out. "Attraction happens to those who don't really mean it, when it's just annoyance, irritation, do you understand?" She had tilted her head to the side, and the similarity between her and her son reminded Draco so much of his own mother that he felt nauseous. "I think I loved him."

"You have to understand, it was bone-deep hatred, if I could kill him I would have. So I guess it had to be love, the cannibalistic kind, I must have wanted him to bite me, but I don't remember anymore." She laughed, James Potter did as well, and they both stared at him, young and clueless about their future, about the savior-boy they were to bring to the world, about who Draco was and what he had done. "He rejected me the first time he saw me. I've never hated anyone more, and he has to forgive me now. It's about time he forgave me." The Potters nodded in unison and motioned to someone unseen to Draco to come closer. Draco smiled. He could see them mouthing _come on, come on. _"I'm glad we had this talk," he told them, and set the picture frame down.

How it became a habit, Draco isn't sure. But he wipes clean all three frames each day and tells them a few things. Bits and pieces, Harry's fine, I'm looking out for him. Looking at him. Anyway.

The one with Potter and his friends, he doesn't talk to it often. Weasley usually sticks his tongue out at him and Potter will move away if Draco tries to trace him with his finger. Draco prefers him immobilized and pliant. Or living and breathing. "You don't know it yet," he told him once," but in a few years you'll get drunk and fuck me against a wall." He doesn't say, one day you'll save my life. Again.

He's a little crazy and a little suicidal, but he's still Draco Malfoy.

* * *

><p>Please, he murmurs in the dream. Please kiss me again.<p>

* * *

><p>It hadn't been a kiss. Draco's bound ribs still ache during thunderstorms, and he tells himself that he deserves it.<p>

The sea is rough and gray when it rains; it wakes in him a bizarre thirst for salt, an itch at the back of his throat. He feels like explaining. He feels like sitting down on a chair like a human being and telling Potter all about the Manor's black soul and how it threatened to eat him alive, about almost drowning in the lake when he was five, about daydreaming, plotting Potter's death for the entire summer of their second year.

He wants to confess. There must be things Potter has yet to understand. Things he blames himself for.

For a few weeks after the incident, Potter stood with his back to the bathroom door while Draco showered. Draco knows because one time he slipped, Potter stormed in with a wild look on his face and his hands clenched to fists, ready to beat breath back into him once more. They had stared at each other in guilty silence, and Potter's eyes had drifted down his chest, to the deep, jagged cuts, Draco's hair dripping wet. Draco had wished then, prayed Potter would leave his guilt and his anger and his entire past behind and climb into the shower with him, and perhaps if they stayed under the water long enough, if they held on hard enough, they'd be absolved of everything they'd done, and everything they'd done to each other.

He pulled the shower curtain closed instead, and the sound of the door clicking shut was discreet but still so fucking loud in his ears.

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><p>He was already soaked through with rain when he jumped, but still he hadn't been prepared for the cold. So typical of him- jumping right into things completely unprepared for how hard they would be.<p>

But he did jump, and he can still taste the twisted pride. Tasted like salt.

His coat weighed him down. Down and down. To his dismay, his body fought. He kicked and grappled. He screamed what was just bubbles and despair. He thought of Potter, could only think about Potter and his fists. You weren't humorous, and you weren't bitter. You were just a pathetic sod that helped kill everything I loved.

Such weak insults, Draco thought. Didn't even hurt, _Harry._

The rest of it hadn't hurt either. Potter had been violent, but he was never strong enough to be cruel.

Draco's coat was weighing him down and his lungs were shrinking and he was drowning.

And for some cruel, cruel reason, he was wishing he had kissed Harry Potter on the mouth, while he was still alive.

* * *

><p>Draco walks out to the terrace when the weather's bad. He wraps himself in wool and lets the wind ruin his hair and threaten to pick him off the ground. He grips the rusty railing manically hard, but he leans forward beyond comfort, and the sea screams and calls at him. <em>Full fathom five, thy father lies. <em>I don't know where my father is, Draco sing-songs, and then he laughs a little to himself. He might as well be there, with the sea nymphs, asking me to die for him once more.

He is peaceful here. So strange, where people find shelter. He has no illusions about being in hiding, about how one day they'll come for him. Harry will find him stiff and cold on the floor next to the piano stool. His dark mark stays covered at all times but he can't hide the seizures. Potter cleans up the vomit and helps him change his clothes, looking spooked and miserable. Draco ran a hand down his face once, like he's done so many times to the still, miniature versions of him on the shiny paper, and he didn't think he would, but Potter leaned into it.

It's just you and me now, old friend, Draco had thought. Old friends, because what else is left for them? There isn't enough hate left in Draco's lungs, and judging from the focused way in which Potter helps rub feeling back to his hands and feet, his own hatred dampened after.

-why haven't you killed yourself yet, Malfoy-

After everything.

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><p>Tonight Draco can smell the storm as well as feel it in his bones. White seagulls fly in small circles close to the gray waters. It's just another ordinary evening in the cold, with the sun half-drowning in the clouds, the constant promise of winter.<p>

He hears the window open and Potter climb out. Harry often comes here, to smoke next to him. The first time they shared a smoke they were both jittery and irritable afterwards, Draco's blood running hotter at the feel of a moist filter tip between his lips. Ridiculous, it isn't as if they haven't done worse. But the Potter that fumbled with his belt and pulled his pants to mid-thigh isn't the Potter here and now, sharing his cigarettes and his silence, the Harry that won't touch him except in those moments of sweat and inarticulacy.

Draco doesn't want to feel the violence again, he was never good with violence. A coward, if you may. Mother's porcelain boy. But he wants to feel again. Him.

I love him, he tells Potter's parents every morning. I loved him, and it might just be an excuse, an attempt at absolution, but he believes in it now, as much as he believes in his mother's dry, cool hands on his forehead.

Tonight Draco feels like sharing another cigarette with his old enemy, perhaps sharing a smile. Potter will talk and Draco will listen and dare himself to close the distance, press his mouth on Harry's and _jump_.

Yes, tonight he's feeling better.

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><p>The concept of a miracle used to seem confusing. A side-effect of growing up with magic, he'd said over his wineglass, a side-effect of growing up with everything, Harry had replied over his. Draco remembers nodding with a smile, he remembers Potter's puzzled look at his easy agreement. It must have been a very puzzling night overall, for Potter at least, even his own actions detached from him and uncharacteristic. Draco knew what he was doing, but not what his actions would bring.<p>

The closest Draco has come to a miracle was the moment Potter punched his chest and broke two of his ribs, the moment he coughed up seawater into Potter's open mouth and regretted everything.

Draco's first miracle happens tonight, this ordinary evening in the cold with the promise of winter and half a cigarette. Draco smiles at the feeling in his chest, the thought of plummeting, and then warm arms bracket his, a forehead is pressed against his nape, and he freezes.

Will you please come back in and talk to me, Potter whispers. Please, I am sorry.

The sea bubbles and lunges forward and the wind howls in protest. In what universe is this apology allowed to be. Draco doubles over, clings to the railing. The words sound so small when he utters them.

Have you forgiven me?

The pleasepleaseplease that rushes in his veins is left unsaid, but Potter must have heard it because when their knees find the floor, he says yes three times successively.

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><p>Later, they kiss, slow and tentative, lying on Draco's couch, knees locked together. Draco wants to break out in tremors, but he can't make a fool of himself now. Potter's face is so close, his hands are here, he is <em>here, <em>and _miracle, _Draco thinks, _miracle. _Potter smiles, small but genuine and he nudges Draco's nose with his own, a gesture that should be terribly embarrassing but it counts as the most affectionate touch Draco has ever received, pathetic as that may be.

"You said you'd talk to me," Potter murmurs against his mouth. "You promised."

Draco pulls away a fraction, stares at his face. There are dark circles under Potter's eyes, his glasses are off. I loved him, Draco thinks apologetically, I'm sorry. He follows the curve of Potter's mouth with his finger, learns his soft smile by touch. I love you, he wants to say. I'm sorry.

_Old friend_, he says instead, his finger still on Harry's mouth, as if to silence him, to keep him from telling the truth.

Harry protests nevertheless. He bites Draco's finger.

"Old?" he laughs. "We're twenty-five."

Please kiss me again, Draco whispers. Harry does.

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><p>~Thanks for reading!<p> 


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